Multicore ARM Chips - Cortex A9

Performance is cranking up, now we have four core ARM chips on the horizon...

Infoworld article on the announcement.

Each of these cores seems to be based on the dual issue 1GHz Cortex A8 design that was announced a few years ago, and which isn't quite shipping yet in products.

So to put this in perspective, the CPU in the Gumstix Verdex and the iPhone is around 600MHz single issue, the Cortex A8 is around three times the raw performance and the new announcement is about twelve times the raw performance. These all seem to be around the same levels of power consumption, in the few hundred milliwatt range.

I would not expect to have the multicore ARM Cortex A9 in actual products in my pocket for a few years, but its good to have a roadmap into the future of millicomputing.